Power Quality [Book Review]

The drive to use electric energy more efficiently has created a need for an increased level in the quality of power supplied to customers. These customers have turned to advances in power electronics to improve the efficiency of their equipment. In many cases, new and more efficient equipment is also more sensitive to power system disturbances. As these devices become more prevalent in commercial and industrial facilities, the number of individuals requiring an understanding of basic power quality increases. Many existing publications address the individual aspects of power quality, such as harmonics, but few exist that attempt to provide an overview of the most common power quality concerns. Those that do exist are written with power quality professionals as their target audience. C. Sankaran’s Power Quality attempts to cover the most common aspects of power quality and do so in such a way as to be informative to those new to, or outside of, the field. In the preface, Sankaran describes the book as “The Power Quality Do-It-Yourself Book.” For the most part, he has succeeded in writing a very good primer on power quality. The first chapter contains definitions of commonly used terms in the power and power quality industries. However, readers should note that his use of the term power frequency disturbance is not part of the standard nomenclature used by the power and power quality communities. He uses the term to describe “low-frequency phenomena that result in voltage sags